Photography of Religious Architecture

Our safety net (Dennis Aubrey)

As readers of this blog know, we recently narrowly escaped a major disaster when I accidentally deleted this blog in April. A supposedly unrecoverable event was saved by the good people at WordPress. Whew.

But it got me thinking, what happens if we lose our actual photographs? We have a 14 terabyte RAID 10 array to store the images and we back up on another 5TB drive, but what happens if the house burns down or someone breaks in and steals everything.

Thecus N7700 Pro NAS storage server

I thought about DVD’s offsite but that simply would not work since the library as it exists now would require 500 DVD’s. We decided on a Cloud-based safety net and signed up for an unlimited account on JustCloud and backed up our entire image library there. This screen capture shows the progress as of today.

Progress!

The process is ridiculously simple. I dragged the Image Library icon onto the “Drag and Drop to Backup” area and it’s done. You can see that over 100,000 of our 198,000 files are safe already. What you don’t see is that this has taken about 16 days to upload over our online system. That means a month’s worth of uploads, day and night. But then we will be safe and our images accessible from anywhere in the world. That solves our anticipated problem of having duplicate databases when we buy our home in France. One final benefit is that we can do all of our backups to JustCloud as well.

So overall, I think it was the best solution. And we breathe just a bit easier.

This happened to me a year ago, loss of 3 of my 4 hard disks, nearly 15 years of email history plus lots of configurations… several hardware failure at the same time but not all the same… Hopefully one disk remained and I had made DVD backups of pictures (only !). I’ve since moved to RAID too, but since cloud are companies, who can guarantee me they wiill be there in one year ? this can be an issue too.

Emmanuel, 15 years of history far eclipsed our three years, it must have been devastating. As far as clouds being companies, we had a bit of experience with that as well. We were part of Digital Railroad which was a wonderful stock company. Invested a lot in the effort, had some real success selling our images, and then they collapsed. Took two years to get back to normal after that. We did a ton of research on the online storage companies and JustCloud looked good. Fingers are crossed!

Very wise to have a safe back-up storage for your photographs. After having just watched a program about global effects of major solar storms I found myself wondering how such an event would effect cloud storage, but hopefully that won’t be an issue. 🙂 We can only do so much and the rest is up to fate, I suppose.

Kerri, if solar storms affect any kind of hardware storage, then the cloud will be affected. You’re right, we can only do so much. I’ve got RAID 10 arrays, a backup 5TB drive and cloud storage. Don’t know what else we can do.

Comments on Via Lucis

“There are people who take pictures, there are photographers, and then, there is Via Lucis. This is the most incredible collection of images from Medieval churches I have yet seen. These places are amazing to start with, but what Dennis Aubrey and PJ McKey accomplish in these spaces with a camera is breathtaking.”

“How do you do it – time after time after time – beautiful photographs that need no words and beautiful words that need no photographs? Combined they transport us to the deepest place of our inner selves. Your gifts of self – an eye for finding the beauty in these ancient buildings and your ability to capture that beauty and share it with others – those are your blessings on those of us fortunate enough to know of your site and follow it.” – Jay Fredrich